Miranda July's bleak but charming THE FUTURE

One of the latest films to land a distribution deal is Miranda July’s THE FUTURE, the filmmaker’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW. On Friday, it was announced that Roadside Attractions will be releasing THE FUTURE.

But despite Indiedom’s worship of all things July, and the mania stirred by ME AND YOU, THE FUTURE was one of those films that scratched, as opposed to scorched, the Earth in Park City. Reviews were mixed—”bleak but charming” was an oft-heard refrain—with much fuss made over the fact that the film is narrated by a cat; a device that people we spoke to, anyway, found either brilliantly imaginative or bizarre.

The film is about a couple (July and Hamish Linklater) struggling with the mid-thirties’ existential blues, who decided to devote one month to living without compromises; included in this is the decision to adopt a feline.

Miranda July (Photo credit: Yvan Rodic/FaceHunter).

If it sounds hard to relate to, that’s not at all what July intended. As she told Variety, “I really do want to be understood. The last step is really connecting to other people—I’ve totally failed if that doesn’t happen. That said, I try and stretch that so people understand things that kind of surprise them, where there’s a sense of communion about things that there really shouldn’t be, because they haven’t been spoken about.”

As for what she hopes audiences will walk away with, she said, “I grew up in a bit of an alternative household, and when I would get kind of down, my dad would say, ‘Isn’t sadness kind of interesting?’ It’s a pretty complex feeling, and maybe that’s what I want people to walk away with.”

For more of Nicole’s dispatches at the Sundance Film Festival see her blog on The Daily Beast.